1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image editing apparatus, an image editing method, and a program.
2. Description of the Related Art
A moving image captured and recorded by an imaging apparatus such as a camcorder includes a scene where an image was not successfully captured or a scene that is unnecessary, and thus the moving image has to be edited to make it look smooth-running. For this purpose, various editing application software for editing a moving image in an editing apparatus such as a personal computer (PC) or the like have been developed.
However, for a user who is not used to editing a moving image, there are obstacles relating to an editing environment and an editing skill, and thus, the editing application mentioned above can hardly be said to be widely used. For example, the obstacle relating to the editing environment may be that selection of a PC and an editing application suitable for the PC is difficult, that a PC has to be of a high specification, or that learning of application operation is bothersome. Also, the obstacle relating to the editing skill may be that a task of selecting a position at which a scene in a moving image is to be divided, of selecting or deleting a scene, of connecting a plurality of scenes, or of specifying an image switching effect to be applied between scenes is difficult.
Therefore, various PC applications have been developed for automatic editing of a moving image. Among these, according to a fully automatic editing application, a user can achieve an edit result of a moving image by simply specifying a moving image to be edited and a desired template. For example, JPA-2004-159331 discloses an automatic editing application that calculates the importance of a sub-shot that is extracted from a video and generates a video summary according to the importance.
However, according to the fully automatic editing application, a user is not allowed to adjust a moving image that has been automatically adjusted, and a desired piece of work might not be obtained. Accordingly, an application that allows adjustment to be made to a moving image that has been automatically edited is also developed. For example, “VAIO de kantan! Suteki na movie wo tsukuttemiyo!,” [online], Sony Corporation, [searched on Jul. 16, 2009], Internet <URL:http://vcl/vaio.sony.co.jp/support/special/appl/dvd_howto05-4.html> discloses an automatic editing application capable of adding a new scene to or deleting a scene from a moving image that has been automatically edited by an application or of rearranging the order of scenes by a user operation.